**** Is there a way to get ekos to fire a capture command to a port on the rpi3 server without a driver?****
Or alternately is there an easy driver I can use to get the trigger? --Or maybe I need to write something? I'm up for whatever but hoping for an easy answer we can all use for old school external triggering for ekos scheduling.

I've been working for quite a while on getting a remote set up with my DIY Arduino_cgem_driver mount ,an Rpi3 running Raspian and indiserver drivers lx200, v4l2(picam guinding), and gphoto2 for the DSLR camera capture. I kept getting stumped by a lack of support for my Pentax K-50 or Eos-m cameras. This appears to be due to manufacturers not allowing it in firmware. Since the remote IR trigger works on both units I decided to make an Arduino based IR trigger for the system and integrate that through the trigger port in the indi driver using the gphoto2 indi driver. I was able to get the trigger to work standalone using serial commands sent to the usb but the eos-m will not allow function or IR while plugged in, and the k-50 lacks support of any kind in gphoto2 and so gphoto won't start in order to provide ekos with a capture port to request. ARGGGH!
Picture recovery is currently going to be done by way of Flashair card to the rpi3/indiserver on the mount or directly to the pc on the lan.

Would this better solved by contacting GPhoto2 folks? The trigger is for a GPhoto2 camera? How are you running Pentax now? or this is just a trigger and no camera is connected to Ekos?

I guess Arduino is redundant in this configuration. You can control any IR dongle from RPi e.g. with LIRC. For integration with INDI you would need a custom driver to trigger it. In such the case image is captured outside of INDI framework at all.

Thanks for the responses!

"The trigger is for a GPhoto2 camera?"
The EOS-M registers with Gphoto2 but refuses to capture.
The Pentax K-50 will not register with gphoto2.

"How are you running Pentax now?"
I'm currently using the direct approach with both cameras which occasionally requires too much yoga and ice skating for my liking.

"or this is just a trigger and no camera is connected to Ekos?"
Yes, I'm looking for a way to trigger a capture without an officially connected camera. The serial "dongle" is just the way I have handy at the moment.

"Would this better solved by contacting GPhoto2 folks?"
I have been watching the gphoto2 chats for a bit and thought about also trying to help them get the k-50 going, but i'm not hopeful as the messages to others haven't been promising. The Eos-M has been stumping everybody in multiple systems and apps for a long time, word has it that Canon purposefully blocked the capture command, even though it appears in gphoto2's command list output. So for now I'm apparently the owner of two really great lame cameras.
-- which is what led me to knock up the IR "dongle" from spare parts on hand to try to get around it; using the gphoto2 driver which offers an external trigger port. Unfortunately, the EOS-M locks out all local input when connected to usb so while I could connect to the gphoto2 driver, and could fire the IR via serial, I still couldn't command the capture. Of course unplugging the camera causes the driver to go off line and ekos won't trigger the port.


@Kaczorek As a result of those experiments, I already have this little arduino nano ir "dongle"(code not shared yet) working on serial and Indilib drivers already send commands serially to cameras so it seemed like the best angle to follow. LIRC looks interesting though. I'll check it out.

Responses from Canon were fairly unfriendly on the matter of the lack of tethering in the M, mostly finger pointing at Japan corporate. Pentax corporate was very nice when I asked, but I've not heard back from them about actually getting serial protocols released. pktriggercord is another possibility but is buggy on the k-50 and has no indilib driver that I know of - this could be a great project idea for somebody.

My idea is a workaround for sure, but yet another camera isn't currently in the budget at the moment. I really like the system btw and
KNRO is awesome! \(oo)/ <--lurking stalker fan

Well, one solution is to develop a "fake" INDI CCD driver that triggers the capture, but this would only work when upload mode is set to LOCAL since no photo is captured by the driver. This _might_ work so you can include it in the regular Ekos workflow but without capturing images and displaying them in it. A better solution is to get a different camera!

Okay thanks. I've been meaning to have a look at the driver development pages. I looked at some source but it's going to take some time to decipher, hopefully the tutorials can help me get started. I plan to use a wifi card to get photos back from the camera and already have an autodownloader script running as a service modified from FlashSirSync that sorts frames as they come in. Maybe I can get Ekos to pick them up from there? Alternately, I can just use kstars/ekos/phd2 for aiming guiding and scheduling and a file display app like DSSlive(I wish they would port to linux already!) for reviewing frames, though I would like to play with the plate solving at some point.

I really like my Pentax and have collected a large bag of old Japanese lenses for it. It is water sealed and has pretty good night capabilities as well as a less aggressive AA filter which were the reasons I bought it over the ubiquitous canon T-series, (unsealed body, strong AA filtering). I was blindsided by the lack of tethering support and eventually decided to buy a canon to fix the problem. did some research though obviously not enough, got enamored with the mirrorless idea, and then found the M series was going cheap due to slow focus. I paid 129$ for an APS-C sensor mirrorless with magic lantern capabilities (long exposure bulb timing! woot!) ..and as it turns out got blindsided by the lack of tethering AGAIN! I probably will buy a ccd or maybe a t-series one day but for now i'm being stubborn!
I have some questions about the lx200 series drivers too, but i'll start a new thread when I get into that.

Thanks for your help and kudos on a great setup for us Linux lovers!

Now that many Pentax cameras are working in gphoto, I still find myself the one unlucky sap left out in the cold due to the broken bulb command in the k50d. After much research and testing I know know that the failure of the k50 to capture in indi are caused by this broken command, which returns an error and does not resume function. I made a remote trigger that works more like the commercial ones, (RTS line high opens shutter) but while I have it working in gphoto2's cli using a short script to trigger the rts line manually from another terminal, The trigger port still locks. It isn't working because the system is still calling bulb() which locks up the camera. Is there a way to have it bypass setting and triggering bulb(), and Instead calling the routine for wait-event-and-download when an external trigger port is defined? This seems like it would help make using an external port more universal with other cameras using the gphoto driver as well.
[edit:] did some hacking today andsaw that it is already doing the wait part. I also found that I was able to get it mostly working by moving the command to clear the RTS line out of the if then loop to make it unconditional.-- just close it at end of time. Seems to be something making it miss that for some reason. More testing as I get time. --oh yeah and I got bulb images!